In my newest release, Kiss of Snow (Berkley), the protagonists, Hawke and Sienna, appear utterly wrong for each other at first glance. Hawke is much older, the alpha of the largest changeling wolf pack in the country and a man marked by painful emotional scars caused by the Psy (a race of psychic people who have been conditioned to feel no emotion), while Sienna is not only a young woman but a powerful Psy struggling with the escalating strength of a deadly power that could cost her everything. Each time they meet, the two incite frustration, anger, and pain in one another

I began writing fiction because it was the only way to tell all the intricacies of a real-life spy story. I had written a front-page piece for the Wall Street Journal in 1983 about how the CIA had recruited Yasser Arafat's intelligence chief during the '70s.

Because I want to. This is no small statement. On planet Earth in 2011 C.E., having leisure time and emotional and physical ease to do what I want, without regard for market potential, is an enormous privilege, and I'm enormously grateful for it. On most days at the desk, this desire to write is all I'm consciously aware of. Call it an impulse, then.

I remember as if it happened yesterday. I was 10 years old, in third grade, and standing at the blackboard at Little Flower School in Milwaukee, Wis. Sister Clotidus had asked each of us to write what we wanted to be when we grew up.

There's a certain amount of irony in the fact that I currently make my living as a writer. When I think back to my high school days (more decades ago than I'd like to admit), I remember having a natural aptitude for math and science, but lacking in the creative writing department. I generally viewed writing with the same enthusiasm as going to the dentist's office for a root canal.

I was fated to become a translator. At four I was exposed to my first foreign language, Tagalog, in Manila, followed by Spanish in Mexico City at seven. Back in the San Francisco Bay area, I took Latin and then German in school.

James Baldwin once wrote, "America is a place devoted to the death of the paradox." He meant that this is a country most comfortable with putting people in easily identifiable boxes. That's why it becomes such a loaded question when someone asks you what you do for a living.

I recently had a disturbing revelation. I started to write about music in my teens, largely because it seemed inevitable. My mother is very literary, my dad was a music buff, and this was the most direct way to combine their two aspirations into the act of writing about music.

I've always wanted to write history, and it was only the accident of going to work for a book publisher in 1958 (and the need to earn a regular paycheck) that slowed me down. Even then, I went through a long, self-imposed, part-time apprenticeship.

Someone once said of the great food writer M.F.K. Fisher: she was a passionate woman and food was her metaphor. It's an image that has stuck with me throughout my career, the idea that what we eat is a touchstone for human existence, and that food writing can tell us about so much more than what was on the plate.

The first time I wrote this essay, trying to explain why I write, I wrote what I've heard other authors say. Essentially (but really well) I repeated the grand idea that writers write because they must—the fire for the literary art burns so brightly in us that without writing as a form of expression, we would scarcely have a reason to go on. Now, after I typed that, I realized that I'm either more shallow or more complex, because I think I have another reason.

My paternal grandfather was a failed novelist. He stacked boxes of rejected manuscripts in a closet. I didn't realize this until much later in life, after I'd written half a million words of my own; didn't appreciate this fact until after he died in 1993, alone on a gold claim in the Yukon wilderness.

An army base is a strange place. An army base in a time of war , especially after 4,000 men pack up their duffel bags, put on their uniforms, and leave their wives and children for an entire year. In You Know When the Men Are Gone, I attempt to show that world and the moments that lead up to the separation, the long and difficult absence, the return.

When I was on maternity leave with my second child, I got the bright idea to read all the classic literature I'd missed in school. Don't get me wrong. I had an excellent education. But I went through high school during the '60s, which meant that instead of Silas Marner, I read Animal Farm. Instead of Dickens, Ralph Ellison. I managed to avoid most English Victorian authors, as well as all the French and Russians.

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